Queer Movie Medievalisms

by Tison Pugh, Kathleen Coyne Kelly (Editor)

Overview

How is history even possible, since it involves recapturing a past already lost? It is through this urge to understand, feel and experience, that films based on medieval history are made. They attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality leading to the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism. Queer Movie Medievalisms is the first book of its kind to grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present, as registered on the silver screen, queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time. It will be of great interest to scholars of Gender and Sexuality, Cultural and Media Studies, Film Studies and Medieval History.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367603083
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Series:	Queer Interventions
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kathleen Coyne Kelly is Professor of English at Northeastern University, USA Tison Pugh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, USA

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Series Editors' Preface xi

Acknowledgements xv

Introduction: Queer History, Cinematic Medievalism, and the Impossibility of Sexuality Kathleen Coyne Kelly Tison Pugh 1

1 The Law of the Daughter: Queer Family Politics in Bertrand Tavernier's La Passion Beatrice Lisa Manter 19

2 Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on Stage and Screen R. Barton Palmer 45

3 "He's not an ardent suitor, is he, brother?": Richard the Lionheart's Ambiguous Sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades (1935) Lorraine Kochanske Stock 61

4 "In the Company of Ores": Peter Jackson's Queer Tolkien Jane Chance 79

5 The Eastern Western: Camp as a Response to Cultural Failure in The Conqueror Anna Klosowska 97

6 "In my own idiom": Social Critique, Campy Gender, and Queer Performance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail Susan Aronstein 115

7 Performance, Camp, and Queering History in Luc Besson's Jeanne d'Arc Susan Hayward 129

8 Sean Connery's Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages Tison Pugh 147

9 Will Rogers' Pink Spot: A Connecticut Yankee (1931) Kathleen Coyne Kelly 165

10 Danny Kaye and the "Fairy Tale" of Queerness in The Court Jester Martha Bayless 185

11 Mourning and Sexual Difference in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Parsifal Michelle Bolduc 201

12 Superficial Medievalism and the Queer Futures of Film Cary Howie 221

Afterword Glenn Burger Steven F. Kruger 237

Index 245

Editorial Reviews

'Through readings of films familiar and obscure, foreign and domestic, recent and classic, Queer Movie Medievalisms challenges us to think deeply about how heterosexuality works and how it inevitably fails, about how a film offers not just multiple points of audience identification but multiple cohabitating times. A superb collection of essays, with an especially provocative afterword by Glenn Burger and Steve Kruger. I commend Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly for producing so valuable and timely a volume.' Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University, USA 'Queer Movie Medievalisms stands alone in the intense and far-ranging (pink) spotlight it deploys to examine cinematic encounters with the so-called "Dark Ages." Combining impeccable scholarship and enthusiastic engagement, the essays in this volume consider how "the medieval" becomes a destabilizing queer space for a range of American and European stars and films.' Alex Doty, Indiana University, USA '... provide[s] the basis for the creation of interdisciplinary as well as intercultural theories of adaptation.' Adaptation

From the Publisher